Kirk Hayes

"At its heart, Kirk Hayes’s work is both delightful and treacherous. It is easy to succumb to the delight of that treachery and to the treachery of that delight—and indeed we should—but we must also strive to understand what Hayes is doing with paint, what conventions he is adapting, what he asks of his viewers, and what relationship his work has to contemporary art as a whole.

There are at least two traditions—long and venerable ones—to which Hayes’s work belongs: trompe l’oeil and collage. Belong’ isn’t quite the right word, though. For as much as Hayes participates in these traditions, he also transforms them."